he worked quickly, he knew he could be outside the movie theatre when the film ended.
The lock on the apartment door had jimmied easily. Poor, naive Jane. Her lack of informed caution filled him with a renewed tenderness towards her. On the bed, blood dripped down the mannequin’s arm, paused in the openness of the relaxed palm, then leapt from the forefinger to the carpet below.
He took the Polaroids he had made of Jane and spread them carefully across her dining-room table. He laid one against the other, matching patterns, shadows, stances, expressions. He permitted one image of her to kiss another image of her. His fingers lingered over her glossy surfaces. He meditated on the silkiness of her image. He took a pair of scissors from the drawer and laid one blade across a photograph, bisecting her face. He moved the blades together until her head disappeared. He raised one of the photographs, poised the twin points of the scissors over the image of her breasts, and pierced them simultaneously with one quick jab. He then began cutting through each of the photographs, disassembling each image of her until he had a large pile of shiny pieces. A bottle of bright red nail polish, retrieved from her dressing table, sat poised on the edge of her fragmented poses. He took this and began painting the pile of clippings with red swirls, arrows and bright red hearts.
He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it to dismember the graceful lines of the bedstead, the side table, the dresser. He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet. He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then seeing himself in the mirror of the dressing table, the glittering blade in his upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.
Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh- so-grey emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.
A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.
Soon she was at the edge of the park, an unusually bright streetlight mounted on the entrance above her. The sharp edges of light dropped painfully through the narrow, dark tree branches. In the distance, she could see women running away from the park. Beyond the sharp sculptures, Jane thought she could hear women screaming in windows.
He saw her stumbling through the park towards him, drawn along like a fly in the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin, scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the tableknife from his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly, ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.
Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her tableknife, the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.
His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment, away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.
She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.
She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.
She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke through a flimsy door, into a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked windows, the only such lighting on the block.
Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain coat. A stocking mask.
She ran through an open door, into a bedroom. Several lamps affixed with coloured bulbs burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly across piles of broken plaster towards her. It seemed to have unusually short hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the coloured lights the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and stroked it — it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins labouring just under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.
Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she thought), their tiny throats cut.
And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for her.
She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups — smeared with dark, blood-like stains — littering the grey linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare, scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects of generations of rot.
She passed through another door into a hall slightly more barren than the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved jigsaw pieces crunching under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges gleaming under the remaining yellow light.
A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.
She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down towards the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.
She jerked her head around, searching for the next escape. A staircase led downwards. She hobbled over and stumbled down the steps.
Animal teeth scattered on the floor, rats in the corners, nesting. A Polaroid of a sliced eyeball had been nailed to the wall beneath a precisely mounted spotlight. Below this was the body it had been taken from: she thought she recognized him as the man who had sold her a comb earlier that day.
Another body lay at the end of the short, subterranean hallway: maggots had blunted the sharp planes of the face and made a curlicue border along the dark hairline, but it still bore a startling resemblance to a woman who used to sell tickets at the movie theatre.
In a small, clean room she found another woman’s body, razor blades embedded in cheeks and neck tendons. A scratching at the small window near the ceiling made her turn her head. The glass broke, as if in slow motion, across her face. It showered down before her like frozen, glittering, magical tears.
First arms, then a head, burst through the rainbow-sheened glass. The man from the restaurant grinned at her through the blood washing over his face. He looked down at the cement floor, where he had dropped his knife.
She stooped and picked up the knife off the floor. She stroked its smooth handle. She imagined using it, slipping it through clothing into flesh and beyond. She imagined making love to the man’s body with it, kissing him all over with it, until he cried. It made her feel strange, imagining a man’s tears, imagining a man’s submission.
Maxwell stared at his lover through a dull red filter. Her constant screams of passion had receded as they blended with the loud music in his head, until eventually he could not distinguish the two melodies. He desperately wanted her to join him with the knife, to make of them one creature, to blend their blood streams until they were, finally, one single, gaping wound.
But then he found himself falling the rest of the way through the basement window, glass and blood
